Will YouTube be blocked?
The Chinese comrades are said to be helping us shut down the global web. Make it from global — sovereign. Build a Great Internet Wall around Russia. They have experience. We have a need. Not with us, of course, as users, but there is a need.
They write that following the results of the visit of President Xi Jinping, a group of several dozen Chinese experts on cyber threats has already arrived in Moscow. A roadmap is being prepared.
In the pilot mode, the project can be implemented by Rostelecom, followed by other providers.
They plan to start by blocking YouTube. Then all kinds of VPNs will be affected. What supporters of censorship in the virtual space were talking about, but could not implement in 2022, is being farmed out to Chinese specialists. By the end of 2023, as they promise, the project will start working.
In the future, this may mean that we may also become dependent on the Celestial Empire in this high-tech area. Is this good?
Of course, the Chinese are now our friends forever. But you never know how it happens. Nobody knows tomorrow. We and the collective West were once a partner.
If something happens, the escape routes are cut off. It is possible to break the old in a short time, but to build a fundamentally new one? It will turn out to be a tracing paper from someone else's, and not your own special way.
The Chinese themselves are well-known pioneers in the field of sovereign Internet. They have copyright on it. They have been engaged in isolating themselves from the rest of humanity from the very beginning of the existence of the World Wide Web — back in the last century. And the “Great Firewall of China” was fully operational in 2003.
The Chinese have a different mentality. They were walled up in whole cities in covid — they did not grumble. And even before that, to be honest, for all the centuries of Chinese civilization, this nation felt great in cultural and political isolation from everything.
We are different. And there is no way to make Chinese out of Russians. Our basic settings are different. And the Internet was originally open. This is how it was born and developed here.
For a long time in the field of the Internet, Russia was ahead of the rest. It was cheaper than in many countries, accessible and flown in any public space.
Unlike, by the way, from Chinese. It works slowly, including because of the firewall. Wi-Fi in public places is weak, it is easier to use mobile Internet. But this is the Chinese way and the Chinese choice, after all.
“In principle, no Chinese are needed to technically bring all this to life on our own,” an IT specialist I know, who, by the way, works abroad, tells me. — It simply blocks or slows down traffic to certain IP addresses. In fact, in China, many Western resources are not blocked, only it is impossible to watch them, they are very slow. Everyone knows this.”
Then I wonder why we haven't put it into practice yet? Without the participation of the Chinese? After all, many foreign platforms have been banned in the Russian Federation for a year, but in practice they work. From the fact that the «prohibitors» are so kind and democratic? I don't think so.
If everything was so simple and elementary, why didn't you do it yourself? Money is allocated for this.
By the way, do you know that in 2015 the Russian Federation and China already signed the Non-Aggression Pact on the Internet? In particular, he meant «exchange of experience.» The experience was that the Chinese even then taught us to stop any manifestations of the consolidation of public opinion, different from the “general line”, so to speak. At the time it seemed to be pure theory. Although money for such programs was regularly received and spent on something. But even Telegram in the end could not overcome. Why create a completely sovereign Internet!
And now it should work.
But again, not quite sovereign, but “made in China”.